Tuesday, May 20, 2014

Tripoli, Libya (CNN) -- The
U.S. military has doubled the number of aircraft standing by in Italy if needed to evacuate Americans from the
U.S. Embassy in Tripoli, Libya, CNN has learned.

A decision
to evacuate as violence in the Libyan capital grows is "minute by minute,
hour by hour," a defense official told CNN on Monday.

Fierce
fighting swept across the city Sunday after armed men stormed the country's
interim Parliament. Sporadic bursts of gunfire and blasts could still be heard
on the outskirts of the capital Monday evening.

The
violence appeared to be some of the worst since the 2011 revolution that ousted
longtime leader Moammar Gadhafi.

Monday, August 29, 2011

After a six-month struggle, Libya’s rebels have seized power. We look at Tripoli in rebel hands and, in a second article, at the new people now in control.

WESTERN governments could hardly have hoped for a better finale. Libyans themselves finished off the regime’s reign in the capital, enabling NATO to retreat to the wings and refute the last flourish of the colonel’s spokesman, Musa Ibrahim, delivered on a crackly radio, that the conquest was the work of imperialism. Liberation came from the west, not the east, allaying Tripoli’s fears of a Benghazi takeover. The doomsday scenarios of a bloody civil war in the streets proved mercifully overblown.